How Much Masturbation is Too Much?

A question I’ve been asked a lot lately (from young men) is how much masturbation is too much masturbation. So here’s some audio advice from me.

Do have a listen, if you want to imagine my voice I sound like a bored Gary Linekar.

What is too much masturbation is really down to you and how you feel about masturbation in general. It’s quite common for people to feel bad about masturbation because think of everything that is said about it ‘it’s for sad people who can’t get laid’ or ‘it’s not real sex’ or think of the sweary insults that relate to masturbation. Also men get told that it’s a sign of weakness if they wank (or get called waste men) and women get special shaming because ‘nice girls’ aren’t meant to enjoy sex and get called sluts or slags if they do.

Our own education around sex can make us feel bad about masturbation too.

Like if we are taught things like sex can be fun and it’s okay to do it if we feel old enough then we might feel quite chill about masturbating. But if we are taught that sex is super important and meaningful then we might not feel so chill about it. So for this reason some people can happily wank several times a day and feel fine, some people may wank once a month and feel awful.

It’s all about your own relationship to masturbation. If you regularly are feeling crap about yourself after masturbation, or you find it’s taking up too much of your headspace, or you are masturbating to the point where you aren’t doing the other stuff in your life you need to (friends, school/college/work) then you maybe want to think about this some more. It’s okay to want to cut down the number of times you wank if that’s what you think is best.

If you want to think about cutting down, maybe think about all the reasons that people masturbate: because they are horny, to have sex, to explore their body, to feel in their body for a bit, to feel nice, to relax, to help them sleep, because they’re bored, to avoid doing work (procrasturbate), to kill time, because they are upset about something. All these can be fine reasons to masturbate – but are there other things you could do to help you to achieve these things? For example could you find an exercise that would make you feel good in your body, or can you do mindful breathing exercises to help you relax? Maybe if you could do this you might find yourself wanking less, but you also may enjoy wanking more because you aren’t putting so much pressure on this one thing to give you so much stuff.

You could try to maybe have fewer wanks and go for quality not quantity.

For example if you have a lot of work on, instead of procrasturbating maybe you could go for the reward wank? Or maybe instead of the odd quick wank here and there because you are bored, maybe you could give yourself half an hour or an hour (in a private space, not on the bus) to really enjoy masturbating. Treat it like it’s having sex with yourself (it is) and you might start to enjoy it more – you also may start to understand your body more too.

Anyway, there’s loads more of this kind of advice and wisdom in my audio above, so do have a listen!